Imagine storing 10,000 standard--definition movies on one disc. Sound impossible? Not to a team of Australian researchers. The team recently published a report in the journal Nature in which it details its development of a "five-dimensional" storage medium that promises to store up 10 terabytes on a single disc.

Peter Zijlstra, James W.M. Chon, and Min Gu of the Swinburne University of Technology found a way to combine addressing data using wavelength, polarization, and three spatial dimensions, creating the so-called five dimensions of addressable space. The approach allows for a storage density of a terabit of information in just a cubic centimeter of space.

Mixing and matching different methods of addressing data has been tried using individual methods, the researchers said. In fact, writing data to a three-dimensional storage medium has been one of the hallmarks of holographic storage. But for five-dimensional storage, the team projected information into the material using different color wavelengths. Additional information was then added by polarizing the light, first at a fixed orientation and then by rotating the filter 90 degrees. Data was read using a technique called "longitudinal SPR--mediated 2-photon luminescence."

It's difficult to say, however, how easily a solution like this might be moved into production, since the medium used to store the information is a network of gold nanorods.

"The major hurdle is the lack of a suitable recording medium that is extremely selective in the domains of wavelength and polarization," the researchers wrote in an abstract. Nonetheless, companies such as Samsung have already expressed interest.